


Never Let Him Go

by witteefool



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Brothers, Gen, Kid Fic, Post Reichenbach, Siblings, caring is not an advantage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-23
Updated: 2012-04-23
Packaged: 2017-11-04 04:18:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/389665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witteefool/pseuds/witteefool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two days later, he realizes that the numbing shock of Sherlock's "death" is thawing out. </p>
<p>He is reminded of the photo hanging in a place of honor in the sitting room of the family house, where Mummy still resides. A photo of the two of them, when they were younger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Let Him Go

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing many, many Sherlock fics. You may not have noticed, cause they've all been on paper. But I've decided to bite the bullet and post them-- they will not magically get better from sitting in my journal.

Mycroft is sitting in his chair in the Diogenes Club. The faint thrum of cars and soft rustle of newspaper are the only sounds in the immediate vicinity. He is holding The Guardian in front of him but has ceased to follow the smudged ink words. The weight of the world is always heavy on his shoulders but there is something particular abut today that makes the very air feel suffocating. If he didn't know that he'd not cried since his father's funeral he might have imagined that tears were on their way. There's a hitch in this throat that no tea or cough can smooth away.

Against his better judgement Mycroft had returned to the family house following the funeral. He hadn't been to the proceeding himself-- he knew John detests his very presence and it was all for show, anyway. But he pretended he had gone when speaking to Mummy the following afternoon. It showed his complete desensitization that the lie, spoken to his own mother, brought no discomforting thoughts. Even the well-understood clenching of his mother's right hand, the one that meant she was in pain but too British to show it, produced no unsettling emotions. 

But now, two days later, he realizes that the numbing shock of Sherlock's "death" is thawing out. 

There is a photo hanging in a place of honor in the sitting room of the family house, where Mummy still resides. Silver-framed untarnished, the black and white photo seems no different from the unsmiling portraits of their 18th century ancestors. If one were familiar with the evolution of public school uniforms one might realize its modernity. Without such an aid the photo is practically chronologically untraceable.

Two boys are standing in front of the imposing manor. Its cylindrical Roman-esque portico reflects the height of the noonday sun. Mycroft, a good six inches taller than Sherlock, wears his crsip navy uniform pinned with his Head Boy ranking. The younger brother is trying to echo the haughty and well-assured stance of the boy next to him. At the moment the photo is captured he has stolen a glance at his elder brother, his eyes turned slightly in order to discover (no, deduce) the details of his brother's self-assurance for recreation. The lower school uniform has short pants and a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar. He seems more likely to have skinned knees than a keen intellectual mind. But even at 10 he was a marvel. 

Things were so different then. Mycroft, as boys on their way to university are want to be, has completely immersed himself in his own world. Where his previous decade had been occupied playing sentinel over Sherlock by 4th year he had abandoned the project. Sherlock had abandoned it too-- the attempts to blend in, to practice the social niceties his whole family mastered and revered as paramount to getting on in life-- were dismissed as unworthy of his attentions. By age 13 every dinner party was used as an excuse to hide Sherlock away with that week's tutor or governess. Mycroft would mingle and charm until his parents sent him to bed. But it had become too much of a chore to herd and explain the youngest Holmes. 

Perhaps it was seeing his brother banished that made Mycroft so keen to impress at these dull dinner parties; the ones he couldn't escape even now. And as Mycroft grew into the golden child Sherlock grew more distant. That photo, just after that photo, is when Sherlock gave up matching his elder brother entirely. The copycatting stopped and turned to feigned uncaring. And uncaring gave way to jealousy until Mycroft's protection became suffocating. 

In his senior year at Eton their father had left permanently. It was Sherlock's fault.

They sat around the formal dining room table, all clumped at one end so as to ease the passing of plates. It was a rare dinner, actually. No guests, no servants, and only a few courses. Mycroft was rather proud of himself, though now he can only remember the feeling, not the cause. A well-played cricket game? Lost to the mists of time.

Sherlock, meanwhile, had past the point of precociousness and had become a terror to his parents. 

"Why did you change your shirt, father?" Sherlock asked innocently. 

To a certain extent Mummy knew the secrets being kept from her. But it was a mark of her upbringing that she ignored them and continued to play the dutiful wife. Father blustered something about a smudge and changing before dinner.

"But this is the ninth night in a row. And you've stopped wearing ties."

At this, Mummy began to look wary. There had been rows, meant to take place outside their son's hearing, about previous mistresses. Mycroft had chosen his mother's path and blissfully ignored them.

"She's blonde," Sherlock continued in his maddening way. He didn't mean any harm, he wasn't even really showing off. He was simply _observing_.

"And you have two love marks on your neck, here," he tapped a finger to the spot on his own neck, "and here. Hence the lack of tie."

Mummy burst into sobs. There was chaos afterwards, but Mycroft can still clearly picture the expression on his younger brother's face: complete bewilderment. 

For two months afterwards Mycroft detested the very sight of his younger brother. It had something to do with needing to believe in his father, his male role model, but still needing someone to hate. After two months he met Jane at a coffee shop in town. And all the anger was filtered into passionate adolescent romance.

By the time summer holidays arrived Mycroft was a world unto himself. The pains and frustrations of childhood and family life were thrown off in favor of University and independence. No one saw him much that summer, but he suspects it was only Sherlock who truly missed him.

Mycroft always felt fiercely protective of his precious younger sibling. Who else would protect him, after all? Mycroft knew that his brother was deeply lonely at that point, lonely the way he would be his entire childhood, but it had not stopped Mycroft from abandoning him. 

Now there is a deep aching pain. Sherlock would tell him he was being over dramatic, but every thought that strays to his younger brother makes Mycroft's heart clench. A vice of frozen, arctic tundra grabs at him. And the worst of it is that he can't entirely hate the pain. Every memory of Sherlock is agony but the tinge of nostalgia does not dissipate.

There are nights when he dreams of him. Normally he is too exhausted to dream, but in those hazy hours where his eye drifts towards the clock and he dread the ringing of the alarm, the in-between bits are full of him. Sometimes they're home and everything is fine. But then Sherlock will disappear around a bush and Mycroft chases after him endlessly until waking. 

Sometimes Mycroft sees him fall off the hospital (he wasn't there, but the images are vivid despite logic) and even though he knows that wasn't truly the end he is sure, in the dream, that Sherlock has left him, alone, for good. After those nightmares he always feels an urge to call him and make up with him and find a way to bring him back home. But he doesn't.

He acknowledges that the spiteful teenager still controls a portion of his feelings. The anger of knowing that Sherlock contributed to clawing his family apart stings unabated. And if there weren't all this history between them he would admit his feelings and have done with it. But there's no having a conversation with Sherlock, even before the incident. And Mycroft knows perfectly well that Sherlock doesn't do feelings, a tradition of the family. (Mycroft himself has instructed him of the peril of emotions in times past.) 

Still, if he could go back in time and speak to the boy in the picture, this alien being that was once himself, he would shake his shoulder's and try to talk some sense into that self-centered teenager. He'd look him in the eyes and simply will the past to change, will his former self to be a better person, a better sibling, 

"Don't let him go," he'd say, "Don't you ever let him disappear from your sight."

But such things are impossible. So he sits in the buttoned leather chair and pretends to read the paper and pretends he has no regrets.

And he pretends that if he does this long enough it will be true.


End file.
